哪些行业会在中美贸易战中受到冲击？What a Trade War With China Looks Like on the Front Lines

来源：纽约时报 2018-06-26 08:25

For Malaysian factories that make light-emitting diodes, it is an opportunity. For American makers of outboard boat motors, it is a threat. For the biggest sellers of flat-screen televisions, it is a nuisance.

The emerging trade war between the United States and China has prompted predictions of severe economic and geopolitical disruption. But for any given industry, the impact of tariffs depends on the microeconomics of its products: How much does demand change when its prices rise? Are substitutes readily available? How much extra productive capacity is there around the world, and how long would it take to get new manufacturing facilities up and running?

“How this will play out is idiosyncratic to any given product and unique to each supply chain,” said Daniel Rosen, partner at the economic research firm Rhodium Group. “Nobody can honestly claim high confidence that they understand what the overall impact will be. You may as well project the weather on a Tuesday afternoon a year from now.”

The United States imposed its first wave of tariffs over the spring, and each of the 1,102 goods that may be affected will end up with its own list of winners and losers. To see how this may unfold, it’s helpful to examine the different trade patterns for those goods, along with some of the thousands of comment letters that companies and industry groups have submitted to the U.S. Trade Representative. And executives and other experts have their own sense of exactly how supply chains might be rerouted and prices might swing for particular goods.

The lesson that emerges: Be skeptical of predictions of radical disruption to major industries in the near term. For now, companies have options to avoid some of the most severe risks.

从中得到的经验是：对近期主要行业将受根本性干扰的预测保持怀疑。目前，公司仍有办法避免最严重的一些风险。

But the longer the trade dispute lasts, the more products will get pulled into it. And the more the United States finds itself at odds not just with one other major economy but the entire world, the more it makes sense to worry. The workarounds that companies are using so far wouldn’t succeed in an open-ended, indefinite trade war.

China has the world’s second-largest economy and is a major supplier of many of the products lining store shelves in the United States. The Trump administration’s first round of tariffs is devised to focus on goods for which there are many other suppliers.

中国是世界第二大经济体，并且是美国的商店货架上摆着的许多产品的主要供应商。特朗普政府设计的第一轮关税针对的便是仍有其他许多供应商的商品。

For about half the items, the share of American imports coming from China was less than 10 percent, based on a new analysis of government data on the sources of the affected products conducted by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.That figure was higher for some of the products that account for the larger share of imports, so China had a 23 percent market share if you use a weighted average. Either way these are not markets where China has a monopoly or anything close to it.

根据彼得森国际经济研究所(Peterson Institute for International Economics)对受影响产品来源的政府数据的新分析，对于其中大约半数的产品，美国从中国进口的占比不到10%，在进口产品中占比较大的产品有更高数字。因此如果使用加权平均数，中国所占市场份额则为23%。不论以哪种算法，这些都不是中国垄断或接近垄断的市场。

Consider light-emitting diodes, the tiny part that makes LED light bulbs illuminate and are used in many industrial settings. The United States imported $637 million worth of them from China last year, more than any other country. But that doesn’t mean China is the only supplier. Japan and Malaysia exported an additional $593 million in LEDs in the United States combined.

So for American companies that import the diodes and incorporate them in their products, such as solar-powered streetlamps, China isn’t the only option. The question is whether other countries not subject to the 25 percent tariff can accommodate a potential surge of demand.

“The trade war, I would say it will benefit us if it really keeps going in the direction of tariffs,” said Daniel Fong, senior regional manager of Oversea Lighting and Electric, located 40 minutes from Kuala Lumpur. “The U.S. market is cutting off all ties to China, and in that sense we have a bigger opportunity to benefit the U.S. market with Malaysia-made products.”

The industry in Malaysia has struggled to make inroads in the American market, in part, said Jamie Fox, a lighting components analyst with IHS Markit, because China subsidizes its LED industry. A crucial machine needed for the manufacture of the diodes can cost $2 million, but regional subsidies in China make them available for half as much, putting competitors outside China at a price disadvantage.

If tariffs make Chinese exporters less competitive, the balance may shift. John See, chief executive of QAV Technologies, said his company’s two LED factories in Penang could quickly increase production by 300 to 400 percent, if demand were there. Malaysia, he suggested, might no longer have to play “second fiddle” to China in business with the United States.

“Have I tried different companies to get a different motor?” said Joy Hurley, business manager at Ray Electric. “Yes, but it’s just not as readily available. There is nothing else that will work in our system.” The company has molds that are already made to fit the company’s current suppliers’ products, and it costs thousands of dollars to change them.

“The motors that I have as options in the United States don’t fit in our housing,” Ms. Hurley said. Meanwhile, the company’s profit margins are too thin to absorb the cost of 25 percent tariffs. In the short run, she said, the company will need to raise prices to pass the tax through to customers.

The American boating industry has complained of many elements of the tariffs. Mercury Marine, for example, of Fond du Lac, Wis., said in a letter to the U.S. Trade Representative that it employs 4,800 American workers, but that the manufacture of 40-to-60-horsepower boat engines in Suzhou, China, is crucial to the enterprise.

“It’s very difficult for some of these companies to absorb these costs entirely,” said Nicole Vasilaros, senior vice president at the National Marine Manufacturers Association. Motors are one of 300 frequently used boat parts facing the tariff, she said, which cumulatively could mean a $2,000 price increase on 14- to 16-foot vessels that generally cost in the low five figures.

Because boats are often bought for recreational purposes, their demand tends to be elastic — highly responsive to price changes. That means those higher prices may well translate into fewer people enjoying their summer in a new motorboat.

因为买船通常是为了娱乐，它们的需求往往有弹性，也就是说，对价格变化非常敏感。这意味着涨价很可能会演变为购买新摩托艇消夏的人数减少。

A Display of Flexibility With Flat-Screen TVs

平板电视显示出的灵活性

Outboard boat motors and LEDs were both on the list for tariffs the Trump administration released this month. There is also something to learn from a product that wasn’t.

在特朗普政府本月公布的征收关税产品名单中，船用舷外发动机和LED都榜上有名。一种不在该名单上的产品也能带给我们一些启发。

Flat-screen televisions were on an earlier list of products targeted, before being spared after weeks of jockeying. But the supply chain for these devices illuminates the options all types of companies have for navigating around Chinese tariffs, and the ways that a trade war on all fronts carries greater risks for American consumers than one narrowly focused on China.

It will become particularly relevant if the dispute with China escalates and televisions again find themselves targeted — which, in recent days, has appeared more likely than not.

如果与中国的争端升级，电视再次成为关税目标——最近几天，这种情况看上去似乎很有可能发生——这一点会变得尤其意义重大。

The manufacture of liquid crystal display televisions takes place in several steps. The liquid crystal is made in sophisticated factories that can cost billions to build. Those displays are then combined with other parts to make the backlight assembly, the innards of a TV.

The last step is the simplest and most labor-intensive: packing the backlight assembly into the plastic shell of a TV, along with other parts like speakers and buttons, and putting it all into a box where it can be shipped to store shelves.

The liquid crystals are made mainly in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China. The final assembly is done in many more places; many larger TVs sold in the United States are assembled in Mexico.

液晶屏主要由日本、韩国、台湾和中国制造。最后的组装则是在更多的地方完成，美国销售的许多大电视机都是在墨西哥组装的。

That shows the ways that savvy companies — which the giants of the TV business like LG, Sony and Samsung are — can avoid having the Chinese tariffs pinch. Shifting even more of their assembly to Mexico could allow them to avoid the tax even if it is expanded to encompass their products.

For example, LG has a facility in Reynosa, Mexico. Bob O’Brien, the president of Display Supply Chain Consultants, said he suspected the company could expand production there to shift assembly work from China.

“It would be disruptive in the sense that they would have to change their plans, but they could hire more people in Reynosa, add additional shifts, maybe change production lines, relatively easily,” Mr. O’Brien said.

“由于他们需要被迫改变计划，这可能会引起混乱，但他们可以在雷诺萨雇用更多工人，增加更多班次，或许还可以相对容易地改变生产线，”奥布赖恩说。

Even if the company needed to open up new production lines, six months or so might be enough.

即使该公司需要建设新的生产线，六个月左右的时间也足够了。

Imagine similar efforts across the TV manufacturing industry, and you can see that where the labor-intensive final assembly takes place might shift if Chinese tariffs were implemented, even if the highest-tech parts of televisions stay where they are. The good news is that strategy would spare American consumers a 25 percent tax; the bad news is it wouldn’t do much to punish China and force it to the table to negotiate over broader American complaints.

Moreover, the strategy of moving television assembly from China to Mexico would be a way to avoid any Chinese tariffs only so long as the North American Free Trade Agreement keeps American imports from Mexico tax-free.

That points to one of the risks of the Trump administration’s strategy of waging trade wars on multiple fronts. When only one country — even a big, important one like China — faces punitive tariffs, companies can find ways to mitigate the damage to their own profits and to consumers.

But if the United States simultaneously raises tariffs on much of the world, corporate strategists have less room to maneuver.

但如果美国同时提高对世界很多地区的关税，那么企业策略师就没有多少回旋余地了。

“Companies will try to find ways to reduce the cost of trade barriers,” said Mary Lovely, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “If you take away all their options, it’s going to be much more detrimental to American corporations and American workers.”

“公司会努力寻找方法降低贸易壁垒的成本，”彼得森国际经济研究所(Peterson Institute for International Economics)的非常驻高级研究员玛丽·洛夫利(Mary Lovely)说，“如果你剥夺了他们所有的选择，那么会对美国公司和美国工人造成更大的伤害。”

In other words, the impact of this first wave of China tariffs, while it will vary across different products for all sorts of reasons, may be manageable. A trade war with much of the world would be a different story entirely.